After having worked with Debian Live (7.6) LXDE for a short while, I have some initial observations:

* CD++ sized starting point is much more practical than I thought. A 900 MB squashfs image contains basic system, LibreOffice, Gimp and Iceweasel, in standard Debian versions (that's the basic philosophy) + a few accessories. No bloat, but quite useful out of the box.

* System setup is awkward, but usable. You can use the "iso/hybrid" image, which can be bare-bones copied onto USB media cp <iso.image> /dev/sdb. Then a read-only iso file system is created, so there is no direct configuration possible. But you can use e.g. gparted to create a partition on the rest of the stick, and set up a persistence loop file, live-rw, there. With boot parameter persistence, this loop image will be union-mounted and used just like knoppix-data.img in Knoppix. You may also use a separate home image.

* While I have been using and reastering Knoppix for years without an ordinary hard disk install, the methods are geared towards working from such an install. Which is no big deal to make, I use a 12 GB partition, it's more than enough. I ran qemu-kvm from that to setup the USB stick, using apt-get and synaptic in the VM.

* 64 bits and nobloat makes a bit of a difference - not very much, but it just feels more right. (And I need it for R, Oracle XEand VMware Workstation)

Debian Live work is very much geared towards making tools, so a partial Knoppification may not be that hard. First step for me will be setting up a complete system, then trying to remaster it.